Some make-em-up thoughts

# 1

Online I see a lot of conversations about getting culture wrong in roleplaying games and to some extent in improv. These are conversations worth having!

However there is a commonplace mode of playing in improvisation that treats mistakes/ignorance as establishing a useful rule about the character or the world.

Eg if I try and butter Alexa up to do something, then I may be establishing something about my character. But I might be establishing that in this world, you have to treat Alexa nice to get stuff. Which of the two decides on how the cast rolls with it. One thing we don’t do is cancel the scene because it diverts from how the world* works. Rather, we get to use that difference to fork into a parallel reality for exploration.

All I’m pointing out here is that ‘getting stuff wrong’ when creating isn’t itself a bug necessarily, it can be a feature. If the direction you get stuff wrong is derogatory, or the way it’s played with makes it so, then that’s a problem. But a degree of drift from reality, dealt with sensitively, can open up new takes and help us look at things with fresh eyes – not just in the dominant culture which we accept is ripe for remix, but in others too.

*Currently!

# 2

In improv, I’m basically interested in particulars and universals.

I love exploring uniqueness: eg a show where we identified a dragon had a BnB, and my knight felt conflicted because he was up for killing a dragon, but hadn’t planned on murdering a landlord (clearly not a true leftist). Drilling down into things that are so totally of themselves, unique situations and reactions.

And I love exploring the human universals: anxiety, suffering, love, joy. Death, birth, estrangement, connection. Common recognition of our human predicament.

Very often, we find the universal simply through exploring the details – a great scene or show will involve both

I’m least interested in exploring generalities: “middle class be like…”. It appears to do the same thing generating details which are often colourful and specific and marshalling them to explore something wider, but it commits a falsehood, as it claims “these specifics are general (false) and therefore we can draw this conclusion about many people through that generalisation”.

Contrast that with “these details are only true here, now, but by examining it we can find everything for everyone.”

# 3

On an improv forum I frequent we were asked “Instead of thinking we are sharing slices of a finite pie, what is a better metaphor that helps you?”

I answered “we are growing a garden” and got asked to unpack: I think that rather than being in this world (or a given enterprise like improvisation) being like trying to slice up a pie, it is more like growing a garden.

  • It’s like growing a garden in that bringing yourself to it and engaging with it makes things flourish, and helps there to be more there than there was before.
  • It’s like a garden because as you pay attention to it, you see more things that could be done, more challenges and possibilities. It has more facets, and the more you look the more you see it.
  • It’s unlike a pie in all these ways – it is not used up by you engaging with it, it is not used for a single purpose.

Improvising Mathematics

So, aways back I wrote with Edmund Harriss an article for Arts Professional about improvisation in maths communication. I didn’t get paid but it got the information out there, which was good. Since then they have paywalled it. Since I have a draft of it, I decided to put it here.

In 2011, the psychologist and improviser Alex Fradera had been exploring how the collaborative theatre and play techniques he used onstage could speak to the demands he had experienced as a practising scientist.  Meanwhile Professor Edmund Harriss was pondering how to explore communication and community with his 2012 Honours Maths class at the University of Arkansas. Discovering our shared interest, we set out on an experiment between disciplines and fields. Here is our field report from that ongoing experiment.

The open exchange of ideas invigorates any field and heightens its influence on the world. But maths is solitary, jargon-heavy, and involves challenging concepts, making communication outside of narrow subdomains tricky. Furthermore, there is little incentive to widen your audience: better to appeal upwards than outwards for your career… besides, do I really want everyone to understand the work I’m doing – what if they think it’s obvious? These concerns can be real anxieties for mathematicians and scientists early in their career.

This project aims to explore how to provide the next generation of mathematicians with a more flexible, resilient and expansive mindset. We want a more functional maths community through greater cohesion, communication and openness, and for individuals to flourish through improving skills and developing a healthy attitude towards success and collaboration.

Formally, the course requires students to develop an explanation of mathematical concepts using a wide range of skills, writing including images (preferably photographs of physical models) and presentation using words and props. This basic structure allowed us to offer a number of activities and processes to explore our key themes.

To practice what we preach, we  built student communication and collaboration right into the course. The class description was extensive and made it clear that “we’re looking to do a little more than usual”, focusing on sharing and communication as much as understanding. The course took a prototyping approach, with a byword of “test, learn and adapt”, welcoming student input, both through informal means and scheduled check-ins, and using this to evolve course content and priorities.

We also suggested to the students that they would get more from the course if they engaged with it with certain qualities in mind:

  • Forgiving – tolerance for mistakes
  • Playful – up for experimentation and taking risks
  • Honest – having standards and sharing when something doesn’t work
  • Intimate – know each other better, to connect and share.

Students were initially formed into buddy pairs: more than study partners, buddies observed each other during presentations, providing feedback and even presented each others material. New pairings were formed after the first formal check-in, making use of what students had realised they needed and could offer to each other.

Additionally, we introduced a range of focused but playful course activities. These were adapted from exercises used in improvisational theatre, notably games developed by Keith Johnstone and his Loose Moose Theatre in Canada (Alex has studied at the Moose and with Keith). For example, a student would present on a simple topic while their audience played the “Beep beep game”, responding whenever they felt personally neglected by sending vocal signals to the presenter until they had been included again. Another game asked the student to present on their own work while incorporating arbitrary words flung at them by the audience. A separate session organised a ‘chat show’ where students, in-character, tested out beliefs about communication. The class ran a ‘maths marketplace’ to pitch projects for others to run, discovering how to spark audience interest. In coming weeks students will experiment with presentation style by explicitly borrowing from their buddy, examining how taking on a new cadence or physicality may assist them. They will also do so with imaginary characters or archetypes: how does rehearsing your talk as a priestess generate new possibilities?

Following a maths and science education route carries the risk of winnowing away habits of thought that are variously described as right brain, rich, or mythocentric thinking. (The arts are not immune, it’s just that the imbalance tends to flow the other way!) So these unfamiliar activities, are an opportunity to revisit different ways of being, with self, other and the world. The students learn skills – how to  focus on audience needs, flexibility in the face of unexpected twists and turns – but also stretch their comfort zones and challenging the idea that success depends on everything going exactly to plan.

Our biggest challenges? Ensuring that the improvisational content genuinely does complement the maths context of the course was crucial, and led to many long skype calls in the months before launch. Also, cross-ocean collaboration leaves Edmund the only facilitator in the room, with Alex offering interstitial support (game ideas and brainstorming) and dropping in to sessions via skype. So it can be tricky to sense the atmosphere in the room and knowing when a stretching exercise has spilled over into simply un-fun. Making a safe space for feedback has been essential. Also we will doubtless understand more where things went wrong through appraisals at the course end!

Edmund can also be found at @gelada http://maxwelldemon.com

January links

For 2020 I’m going to see if I can keep up some of the stuff I was blogging last year but decompose it a bit, so I don’t need to feel I have to cover every base to post something. Links are pretty easy, so here are some things I found interesting this month.

Our blanket fear of anything associated with the “C” word, and our blind belief that more screening is always good, beliefs rooted in what we used to know about cancer but is now outdated, are doing us great harm, in many cases more than the disease itself.

Curing Cancer, Curing Cancerphobia


Map naming and (vaguely) locating the CEOs of companies miserably producing more greenhouse. Now, it’s not as if those people grabbing a conscience and doing a Jerry Maguire would solve the problem – systems are going to system, and their replacement is ready and waiting in the corner office on the floor below – but it did strike me to see the names written out so starkly. I had the thought years back that at some point people would start pulling together blacklists of people (and their descendents) who contributed to the collapse, and membership on those lists would result in sanctions so severe that people would become very motivated to do whatever they could to get dad to stop the lobbying, for the love of god please dad they’ve tarred and feathered me twice this term already

Names and Locations of the Top 100 People Killing the Planet


Interest in medical improv has been growing in recent years, as medical schools and teaching hospitals increasingly value the skills it teaches, says Lisa Howley, PhD, AAMC senior director of strategic initiatives and partnerships. Research shows that effective communication can improve patient outcomes, and improv markedly increased communication skills in one study of pharmacy students. Now, researchers believe a new tool published this month can better measure the educational effects of medical improv. Developed by four medical schools, the scale found that participants in a six-hour enhanced medical improv course scored significantly higher than those with no improv training.

In-the-moment listening skills are a profound benefit of improv, says Amy B. Zelenski, PhD, an assistant professor and director of education for the Department of Medicine at Wisconsin.

A colleague once told her about a time when a patient offhandedly mentioned that a close relative had just died. “He just went on with his questions and ignored that information,” she says, “and then later thought, `Oh, man. Why didn’t I respond?’ That’s what improv does — it teaches people to set aside their agenda for the conversation and listen.”

Discovering interpersonal strengths and shortcomings through improv is potentially transformative, Watson believes. “It lets learners identify where they need to build muscle and where they’re flourishing. You’ll have the person who’s very eloquent but doesn’t know how to be quiet. Or a person who is fine handling anger isn’t good with sadness.”

No joke: The serious role of improv in medicine | AAMC


A friend from my cohort got involved in a project in Sierra Leone described in this article:

Imagine you live in a small community that has deep-seated suspicions against outsiders. The concept of infectious disease is unclear or misunderstood. Many in the community believe that illness is the result of a curse, and stigmatize the sick as a result. Then people from other countries descend in what appear to be space suits, disrupt community life, and take the sick away to quarantine them. Most of these people are never heard from again.

given the historical and cultural context, it’s not so surprising that there has been resistance to outside intervention in some areas where the Ebola outbreak is worst….What is needed is action that emerges from within Sierra Leone itself.

After its founding, Commit and Act connected with and helped to train dozens of Sierra Leone counselors in ACT, including the person who is now the current local director of Commit and Act, Hannah Bockarie.

The mission of the organisation is

“to bring psychotherapist support to traumatized people in areas of conflict.” Their goal is to help people find trust again and develop the courage to create their lives according to their own vision.

Since Commit and Act had established roots in Sierra Leone back in 2010, when the Ebola epidemic hit a few months ago, they were in a unique position to help. Bockarie was on the ground when the virus struck, and realized quite quickly that the ACT and PROSOCIAL models could be used in innovative ways to educate the population about the disease and help develop healthy behavioral alternatives that may assist in stemming its devastating tide. PROSOCIAL is a joint effort by evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson’s Evolution Institute, and the ACBS to combine ACT with principles from the late Nobel Prize winner, Elinor Ostrom, to foster prosocial groups.

In Sierra Leone (as in much of West Africa) it is customary to keep the bodies of dead relatives in the home for several days — praying over them, washing them, dressing them, even hugging and kissing them….it is incredibly difficult to get people to change burial customs that are so culturally important and entrenched. …But changing these customs — and fast — is of the utmost importance for obvious reasons: Ebola infection is highest at death

Bockarie has begun taking groups of people through ACT and PROSOCIAL sessions to help them come up with alternative burial customs that are in line with their values but still allow doctors and health worker to properly dispose of bodies.

The article describes one such solution, arising from community members and suggests that it is informed by the greater psychological flexibility accessed by the therapy, allowing people to change what needs to be changed while never letting go of core values.

Kissing the Banana Trunk: Will You Commit and Act in the Fight Against Ebola?

improving improv

Elseweb I put together something I’m pretty proud of, a list of ways to help build the local improvisation scene in 2019. It’s here at the Open Heart Theatre blog. Doing it involved gathering together ideas from a bunch of people across the UK and beyond, and it was a rare example of Facebook really being useful. It was also a chance to flex writing muscles a little, as I’m not doing as much as I’m used to doing. Here’s a good point from one collaborator:

Believe in ourselves more. The UK scene has the world’s longest running improv show (Comedy Store Players) and started Whose Line which took improv into the mainstream. Keith Johnstone came from England, and we have inherited a rich theatrical tradition populated with leviathans. We have some of the most successful improv shows worldwide (Showstoppers, Austentatious, Comedy Store Players) as well as improv groups that have broken out into other theatre (The Mischief in the west end and broadway).

We have developed a glorious melting pot of styles, thanks to our own traditions and the benefits of being geographically near to European community and linguistically near to improv centers hundreds or thousands of miles away. Let’s keep being brave and experimental and non-exclusive.

Retrospective on Murakami improvisation

On the “social murdiers”, someone asked me about our Haruki Murakami improv format, and I’m reprinting it here to keep.

The format was the brainchild of Susan Harrison. Our group Storybag had  been working on non-genre narrative for a couple of years and wanted a genre that would improve our skills but also complement the philosophy of narrative work we had settled on, which avoided skeleton structures and mandatory beats and focused on following what felt important from the story so far.

Murakami was a neat fit because his work blossoms with tropes and a particular atmosphere but doesn’t live or die on its particular structure (an aficionado might well be able to identify one, but it didn’t seem to us the primary thing offered by his writing, which is elliptic and avoids clear endings).

What tropes? He loves riffing on the Beatles or jazz culture, on the best way to make a broth and the contours of the city. He dives into details and gives life to them. So we tried to get better at that quotidian specificity. To avoid a vomit of bland detail we practiced reading expository sections of the books and improvising from there, allowing us to internalise some of Murakami’s voice and the flavour of his enthusiasm for these details.

We looked at highly fantastical characters and the way in which Murakami was efficient in allowing such characters to encounter the protagonist. Generally their fantastical nature is recognised but accepted, rather than denied or held in extended disbelief. This means such encounters are often calm and curious, and to reach there we had to overwrite an old skill developed to respond to weird situations, the classic “game of the scene” approach of calling things out and being a resistant voice of reason. Instead, we would try and allow ourselves to get swept along while still telegraphing some of the strangeness. A muted Alice in Wonderland, perhaps.

Another trope found within such encounters is that the fantastical character often has access to things intimate to the protagonist – knowing the other person’s thoughts or history or having habits that parallel something from their backstory – that aren’t explained at the time. There are a couple of excellent improv skills that align with that well: making thing personal, and jumping (making a step forward) before justifying (worrying if it makes sense). So we just had to identify the relevance of these skills and start to explicitly use them.

There was lots of other stuff: playing strange characters in relation to each other apart from the protagonist’s normal world, storytelling skills, other tropes like talking animals. Our musician had recently bought a Kaoss Machine:

…. so we were working a lot with samples and atmospheric background sounds that added a lot.

In a sense the shows were Murakami reimagined or digested and dreamt, rather than faithfully reproducing something that would have felt as thorough as the novels would have. I much prefer this approach to improvising work, compared to distilling the core path and trying to follow it show after show, but I don’t know whether a Murakami fan would have prefered a Murakami by numbers… it’s an open question whether that is even possible, mind you.

Thoughts for people who want to start teaching improvisation

I got contacted recently by someone looking to run an improvisation course and looking for a few tips. I thought my reply could be useful for a general audience, so here it is.

I was asked about syllabus and general advice. I’ll come to syllabus at the end because it’s a tricky one to answer, so I’ll lead with the more practical things, written with a beginners course in mind: a couple of tips on preparation, a couple on how to run content, and a few more on how to engage with those participating.

Plan a variety of activities, such as

– whole group
– small groups (eg 3-4) in parallel
– pairs in parallel
– solo/pairs/groups in serial, with the remainder watching

Often start with group activities and then use a blend of the rest, not spending too long in one type. If possible, warm-ups are in service to the topic at hand, but it’s never a wrong move to build connection, attention or energy.

Prepare a few more exercises than you need
Sometimes things don’t go quite as you expect, or for practical reasons prove undesirable (a running game when two people turn up with foot injuries). Sometimes things get done really quickly – there was a lesson you thought everyone needed to learn but they already knew it. So it’s always nice to have a few backup exercises in the bandolier. However, bear in mind you should…

Run fewer exercises than you think
This took me a long time to learn! As workshop leader, we often get fixated on working through our Agenda, and we’re so buzzing with ideas and activities that we miss that there can be a lot of pleasure and learning that comes out of an exercise repeated. There is no rule for how many you should do, but often, aside from warm-ups/energisers, two to four exercises (maybe with variants or add-ons) can be enough. Even in beginner workshops which are heavier on the warm-ups, if the group is really into a game you can stick with it for a while. Even 30 minutes or more if it is helping the group coalesce. You can always tweak the game a bit, which brings us to

Be open to tweaking on the fly
As a teacher you are also improvising, so always be prepared to pause an exercise and suggest something to improve it, from the more obvious “let’s do that again but with four times the commitment” to the seemingly arbitrary “let’s keep passing the ball but continually shift from sitting to standing.” Trust your intuition in the same way as you are asking your students to. Sometimes students themselves will suggest tweaks; teachers differ on how to handle this but personally I’m open to trying these out, while making it clear that the responsibility for the workshop remains with me. Speaking of students,

Allow participation
Allow time for students to reflect aloud on their experiences of doing exercises. When things are allowed to be spoken it helps us to really know what we are thinking and feeling, and sharing these insights with others helps them to understand things better. Also encourage students to ask questions, to check understanding or to voice doubts or uncertainties they have. As the leader of the group you may need to restrict this kind of dialogue when it risks turning the workshop into a talking shop, but it’s important the opportunity is there. You can plan check-in points in your teaching plan, but also be alert to what’s needed. After all

You’re mainly a listener
Again, impro basics, but again it’s true. What’s the energy like at the start of the day? How are people responding to high-energy stuff? How about now? Is everyone integrated or have things shifted into a few sub-groups? Are those two people just a bit anxious or ‘have a reassuring word with them in the break’ anxious? Could we do with a break now? How do people feel when they pair up with that energetic person with the massive voice? Drinking everything in with every sense you’ve got. You don’t have to get this stuff right! You just need to care about it. And active listening includes asking a question and getting the answer. And be prepared to act, because

You’re also a leader
Make the calls that need to be made: if you think an exercise must be abandoned, abandon it. If you don’t like content in a scene, call it short and say why. Take responsibility for the atmosphere and make sure people feel safe. I strongly recommend taking time at the start of the course to set out expectations for how people treat each other in the class. It doesn’t need to be a fully scoped code of conduct but you should let people know that respect and comfort are key to the work you are doing together. You can also ask participants to contribute to these expectations.

I haven’t said too much about personal style. There are almost as many effective ways of teaching as there are types of people. Some teachers are preternaturally calm, others cheer at every opportunity; some stay seated, others gravitate into the scenes they are coaching; some reassure whereas others tease. Be decent, be encouraging, be fair, and be you.

Now, syllabus. This is a general question that is impossible to provide a general answer: it depends on the particulars, on your philosophy and the style of improvisation you want to seed. Many people in the UK began by learning shortform games, but I know many schools that don’t. Some people might consider open-ended group performances to be advanced-level stuff, but when Randy Dixon taught the organic Harold, I asked him whether he could see teaching beginners with that form, and he could. I very often use masks in introduction courses, which to others might seem too niche an area to call on.

If I was to give any explicit advice it would be to make sure that the early weeks focus on connection, getting to know each other, positivity, finding fun in mistakes, and the simple joy of playing games together. Other topics that I might focus on would be status, letting go of control, staying in the moment, mime/space and playing different types of things, story structure, emotional reactions, truthfulness, the idea of ‘platforms’, more complex games with restrictions. But most of all, unpack the vision that you care passionately about in improvisation.

 

 

An image of ten improvisers posing in garish t-shirts
My continuing group in Germany last year – we had a cheesy t-shirt theme to the final class, an idea I stole from iO’s Todd Edwards. Any gimmicks you’ve found useful to beginners?

 

A dreaming phoenix

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Last week, I reflected about the fun I’ve been having recently with Storybag. Another delight in late 2014, appearing like a phoenix from the flames, was The Dreaming.

The Dreaming was born back in 2012 – briefly called Carnosexual before we thought better of it. I formed the team, coached and occasionally played when our numbers demanded. And here I have to make an aside, if you’ll bear with me. I’ve noticed that improv teams, like many groups of people outside of formal structures, can struggle with naming and recognising ownership and authority, often preferring to promote a consensual vibe and muddling through when it comes to crucial decisions or matters of vision. (I think these tendencies are magnified twice: once by the conflict-avoidant, passive aggression of the English middle class, and the other by training that can be [mis]characterised as prizing consensus over standing up and playing your part.) This finger points at no-one more-so than me, which is why I’m owning up, explicitly, to authoring the group into existence, and shepherding it forward according to my goals. It was my baby, even if its manifestation was utterly determined by the great players I was lucky enough to touch and be touched by. In the end, this iteration burned bright – a slew of really fun gigs –  before real life and geography dispersed us.

This September I found myself sharing a few days with founding members John Agapiou and Clare Kerrison at the Maydays Impro Comedy Festival at Osho Leela in Dorset, and the idea came up: why not get the band back together? So, with the help of superb musician and Mayday Joe Samuel, we did. And then we did it again in Cambridge, and – back with Joe again – in Brighton at the end of the year. So, it’s kind of a thing now.

And you know what? I wouldn’t call it my thing.

I formed the group with a simple and selfish agenda of giving my friends new to London a forum to play in. As conditions have changed – my buddy Brandon is back in the US, and John is plenty busy on his own terms – that need simply doesn’t exist anymore.

On top of that, in 2012, I had come back from the Improv Olympic with a clear picture of pursuing  long-form highly organic sound-and motion touchy-feely morphy stuff – what the Dreaming are all about. During the hiatus, I’ve become more focused on other components of improv: on slower, longer scenes, unearthing character, that sort of thing. It’s not that I don’t rate the morphing abstract stuff, it’s just that the desire to do it has been sitting quietly, waiting to be woken up. And it got woken up loud, by John and Clare, with John in particular driving our rehearsals and revealing to us something hidden inside our work together: that we had to embrace looking like pretentious arseholes to get close to doing the kind of work that excited us.

I am totally invested in what I get to do with Clare, John and Joe. But it’s important to recognise that this is not my thing anymore – my thing lived its mayfly life and was done. From the bones of that we’ve boiled up a new soup. New philosophy, new direction of energy. It feels good to recognise how that can happen, the phoenix, the new thing directly from the old thing, wearing its skin, but new again.

The Murak-army

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Yesterday I got back together with my improv family Storybag to rehearse our latest show, an improvised play based around the themes of Haruki Murakami’s novels.

Storybag was a project that took time to come together. Perhaps rare among improvisers nowadays, who aim to get as much stage time as possible from the off, we spent nearly a year rehearsing together to find our groove, form a group mind and develop trust before asking audiences to come and see it.

We did a string of shows, a few being some of my favourite things to have done on stage. But over 2014 it began to feel less inspired. As I wrote about in the past, in the absence of genre, our stories all began to accrue that particular impro-story genre. We needed a shot in the arm, which we got last September when Sue (Harrison) proposed Murakami. Not only our first genre show but a genre which is specific, challenging and inspiring to our own perspectives. As Sue is a Murakami superfan she’s been able to provide clear artistic direction from the off, and as we immerse ourselves in the work, our group mind reattunes itself around the landmarks and milestones that demarcate this world.

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I’m particularly happy that Dylan (Buckle), our musical performer, has leapt on the opportunities and challenges that Murakami brings, from a forensic interest in Western music styles from jazz to rock and even classical, to the tonal demands of the work, which he’s deftly exploring using his Kaosmaschine (I don’t know either, but it’s cool piece of kit).

Our debut in December was a real delight; we played on the tips of our toes, toppling into characters that stretched us and exploring mood and emotion. We’ll be kicking into gear with the show in 2015, and excited about where it can bring us. If you’re in London on the 9th March, we’ll be bringing Murakami to the wonderful Duck Duck Goose night.

Competition! Round Two: Show over Self

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We’re talking about competitive impro – see Part 1 here. We left off with a nice account of how Theatresports, with its ‘contest’ of team versus team, is well positioned to create heat and energy in the audience

Obviously, not all competitive shows need to be the same. You might decide to play with an energy and vibe different from wrestling/sports, or even deconstruct it in some way. And I should note that Theatresports is carefully designed to produce its atmosphere, through Judges-as-bad-cops, scoring often taken out of the hands of the audience, the ‘Horn for Boring’, the basket. The Maestro format certainly has less ‘heat’, on the whole – although if you have a couple of mischievous players, like Daniel Arantia and Shawn Kinley, then all bets are off. But the core point remains: competition isn’t, really.

In actual fact, sometimes for the good of the show you need to take a risk that may provide you with a lower score, like doing a differently-paced scene to avoid pushing the audience to the limits of what they can take, or even just doing something crazy experimental with a strong likelihood of ‘not working’ to show the audience early on that the show can take any twists and turns, and we’re ok with that – and ok with their honesty on what did or didn’t work.

I remember a Theatresports final way back when – this is second-hand reporting; I couldn’t make the final (anyway we got kicked out in the first round, which is a typical Theatresports for me. Maestros treat me well, though). Somehow, an audience member managed to get entered onto the scoreboard as if they were a team, awarded points each round, and ended up winning the show. Apparently the front-runners were incredibly gracious in awarding them the trophy, but in the days that followed there was some wondering  (perhaps not from the group but from friends or fans) whether this prevented them from claiming the bona fide champion title, for their press/flyers etc. It’s an understandable instinct that is also symptomatic of how easy it is for real-competition to creep into play-competition.

Similarly, I remember operating lights in another show and bringing a blackout three seconds into a scene because the very first line was a clear, funny button. (I would have been too chicken to do this on my own; the director correctly waved me down.) Again, I got the sense of a little dissatisfaction from the players: the scene got a good but not great score, I guess because the audience felt they hadn’t earned max points, and the team were very strong, so may have felt that possibility was stomped on.

And in terms of fair competition? Absolutely, they were (possibly) robbed of a point (or we saved them from mediocrity, who can really say).

But in terms of the show? The show needed a short scene, some contrast, a surprise. If the show is constrained by ‘fairness’ and due process of the competition, this puts those impulses in tension. It allows recrimination. Forget an early blackout, what about when a player from another team comes into your scene with a call-back, some meta-commentary, or even just to be mischievous and steal your chair while you aren’t looking? How can we as a collective ensemble – all the players in the show – be free to take risks when it might be perceived as sabotage or bad sportsmanship?

In addition, when we stress, we fail. The best shows are the ones where we feel the most effortless, where we feel even-handed towards whether we are doing it ‘right’ or not. When you pile on the pressure onto yourself, when you feel more judged by others, or less safe, you are very likely to do worse work on stage. J and I were asked to fill a gap in the last 5-aside, but were simply too knackered to feel we could put in a showing. For the hour or so we toyed with it, we decided we would have to set our own criteria for success: most pretentious group; fewest words spoken, most scenery in other people’s scenes. Anything but ‘winning’ or god forbid, ‘our best improv.’

It might seem like genuine competition has a function, to identify strong teams, but I think that’s a red herring. The strongest players should be making others look good, regardless of whose team they are on. And on any night, our function is to give the audience and other players a good time, and learn something along the way. That might mean doing a calmer scene/set than you might have done, because the group on before went wild and wacky, and you want to give the audience the gift of a moment to regroup, and the other group the gift of contrast, setting their piece apart rather than outdoing it. (And sometimes the opposite, attempting to outdo their crazy with ridiculous bravado and swagger – to the point of breaking down or looking ridiculous – might be the right decision for the night.)

We can’t be mischievous or risky unless we feel safe, and it’s difficult to feel safe when other people are in some way ‘against’ you. The best competitions I’ve seen have involved a great deal of mischief, but it does depend on that safety: if there are people on-stage who take the competition at face value rather than as a conceit, they may well resent it or even view it as gamesmanship.

Let’s sum up. I find competitive formats great because:

  • they can generate heat
  • they can allow more people on a single bill than would normally be practical, using elimination (eg Maestro)
  • they give a clear shape to the show – people understand competition, eliminations, points-scoring et
  • they encourage mischief and make it mean something, as the mischief can be punished and ‘justice’ done
  • they give playful ways for different teams on a bill to interact – challenges, helping, sabotage
  • they can provide authority figures with high status to look after the show and give freedom to players to act out – kids need the adults around to really be seen as such
  • it’s a great way to tells a second story (another Tom Salinksy insight for me): the story of the performers as well as the stories within the scene. Grudges, gratitude, the whole shebang.

And the advice I try and give myself before a competitive show:

  • Set yourself a fun goal
  • Don’t attach too much meaning to the prize
  • Form a one-off group to play with. Then you won’t subconsciously worry about winning or placing well.
  • If the conditions make it safe to do so, be mischievous.
  • Warm up together – regardless of whether you’re on different teams. Get together, you are the cast of one show.
  • Try to make other teams look good.

The next Impro 5-a-side is coming up on 23rd March.

The next London Maestro will be at the Camden People’s Theatre on Sunday 4 May – details to come at the Spontaneity Shop.